There’s no bad publicity? Think again

Although the following will closely resemble a scene out of a Mel Brooks flick, it was torn out of the (somewhat obscure) news service headlines by your intrepid editor.

So, Dear Reader, if you are offended by orgies, peeved by prostitutes or non-tolerant of Nazis, avert your eyes now.

But if you agree that life imitates art (try Mel Brooks musicals with sexually dis-oriented Nazi stormtroopers) far more than art imitates life, then boldly read on.

Seems that the president of the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile, the governing body of Formula 1 racing, has had a spot of bad publicity lately in the form of a five-hour orgy with prostitutes that involved spanking and Nazi role-playing, according to the always staid Associated Press.

It wouldn’t have been bad publicity for motor racing chief Max Mosley, 67, had his consorting with prostitutes not been covertly videotaped and then posted to a British tabloid newspaper’s Web site.

Mosley’s lawyers had sought an injunction to prevent the News of the World posting the naughty footage, according to the AP. But judge David Eady ruled the paper could post the 90-second clip.

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Mosley admits visiting the prostitutes (There has to be an Eliot Spitzer punchline here somewhere), but denies there were Nazi overtones to the encounter. The allegations are particularly sensitive, the AP said, because Mosley is the son of the late Oswald Mosley, leader of Britain’s fascist movement before World War II and a friend of Adolf Hitler.

Now, for the sake of authenticity, you, Dear Reader, must conjure up all those Monty Python episodes stored deep in your subliminal silliness and continue reading using your best British accent.

“The very brief extracts which I was shown seemed to consist mainly of people spanking each other’s bottoms,” the judge noted.

The judge said that, although the footage was “intrusive and demeaning,” it had been published so widely that granting an injunction against it “would merely be a futile gesture.”

“The dam,” said the judge, “has effectively burst.”

Yep (resume American accent here), and burst big time. From the time the footage was posted on March 30 until it was removed by the newspaper the next day, it had been viewed more than 1.4 million times.